October 20, 2009
Sean Penn
In the last few weeks, I’ve found “Sean Penn” used twice as a metaphor for manic behaviour: in Douglas Coupland’s new novel Generation A and Lorrie Moore’s story “What You Want to do Fine”. This is remarkable because a) didn’t Sean Penn stop self-destructing in about 1989? funny that this remains a touchstone, and b) if I’ve found two, there must be more. I will be on the lookout from here on in. Perhaps he really could end up with his picture in the dictionary under “crazy”.
October 19, 2009
Author Interviews@ Pickle Me This: Jennica Harper
I first met Jennica Harper in the early 1990s, when I was about the same age as her protagonist in What It Feels Like for a Girl. Back then, she was my older cousin’s girlfriend who wrote(!), and though I could never think of anything clever enough to say to her, I admired her from across the room. When a couple of years ago, however, I read her book The Octopus and Other Poems, I was so taken with it that I had to convey my admiration directly. I sent an email and Jennica responded with what I’ve come to understand is characteristic graciousness and generosity, and since then we’ve bonded over Crowded House (as you do).
Jennica will be featured in two readings next week in Toronto for the International Festival of Authors. Her newest book is What It Feels Like For a Girl: “a series of poems following the intense friendship between two teenagers as they explore pop icons, pornography, and the big, strange world of sex.” She was kind enough to answer my questions from her home in Vancover.
I: What It Feels Like For a Girl is not your average book of poetry. A book-length ode to Madonna, friendship, dancing and music, it explores adolescent obsession with pornography, images of female sexuality, of desire, of betrayal. Where did this work begin? How did it evolve into its finished product?
JH: The genesis for this story was a complicated, all-consuming friendship I had when I was 13 – my first love, in a way. I’d been haunted by this friendship, this girl, this time in my life for quite a while, but never thought I’d write about it. It wasn’t until I got older and realized how ubiquitous this kind of friendship is for teenage girls that I felt like I wanted to unpack mine a bit more.
Then what I needed was some courage. I wasn’t afraid of the book being too racy – I was afraid of the earnestness I knew would be necessary to tell the story. Somehow earnestness makes me feel more vulnerable than talking frankly about sex! I convinced myself the first pages I wrote were just play; that I could throw it all out without ever showing it to anyone. That gave me the freedom I needed to explore the story however I wanted, and I found that the looseness of my drafting (jumping from tangent to tangent, allowing word play to have its way with me) helped me discover some of the motifs that became central to the story. This idea of the dancer being the truth-teller to an audience who might not want to see the truth… I didn’t plan for that thread, but it became crucial to the telling of the tale.
Is this a good place to mention the story’s heavily fictionalized? It is? Oh good.
I: Until reading What It Feels Like For a Girl, I’d never considered how much early adolescent sexuality (or at least the fixation with it) is a bookish pursuit– you mention “the real English class” with Lolita, The Happy Hooker, and even “a few pages from Danielle Steele,/ copied, folded and ready”; the girls pore over magazines (though I note, not for the articles); Madonna’s lyrics from the Bible; you reference poetry and “dead poet fantasies”; even labia are “open books”. What connections do you draw between books and sex?
JH: Books are super sexy. It’s not just me, right?
I was definitely a young reader who sought out sexy scenes in books. It was a way to learn, while anticipating what I’d one day get to do for real. I wanted to be part of it, think about it, imagine it, but didn’t really want the scary part: the bodies, the sweat, the awful sounds. I think reading about sex allowed for the perfect balance between fantasizing and maintaining some sense of mystery about the whole shebang.
I: There is much talk these days about overt sexuality in popular culture and the effect of this on young people. And yet, your book (and my own memory) makes clear that young people have always been obsessed with sex. Do you think things are different today than they were twenty years ago? Is your book relevant to modern teenage experience?
JH: I do think young people have always been obsessed with sex. I know there’s a lot of talk about how teenagers are going further faster these days. I’m sure that’s true, to a degree. But I was a 13 year old who just assumed I was the only one who didn’t really even want it yet; I thought everybody was way ahead of me, in action if not in thought. Apparently it’s still true that teenagers talk a big game and aren’t necessarily fucking willy-nilly.
What I really wanted to explore in the book is that mad desire – the desperately wanting, but also the relishing of the not-getting. Wallowing in that. It’s its own kind of satisfaction. I was reading Anne Carson when I was writing the first draft, and was affected by her thoughts about desire. Desire dies the minute you get what you want. You’ve got to enjoy the wanting. (Sincere apologies to Ms. Carson for my oversimplification…)
I do hope that delicious, painful, amazing feeling hasn’t been lost. I don’t think it has. Isn’t that largely what the Twilight madness is about? The sweet can’t-haveness?
I: “But what makes girls and boys/ see sex and want to beat it down?/ Standing in the gym you realize/ poetry has taught you nothing.” Was the medium the problem, or the poems themselves? Or the reader? Is this poetry than can teach something new?
JH: Should I ever have a book marketed to book clubs, may I hire you to write the suggested discussion questions? (I: Thank you.)
I think the problem was a little about the poems, a little about the reader. Poetry had not prepared the speaker for the particular complex problem she was facing. But maybe she just hadn’t read the right poems yet.
I: Why is/was Madonna important?
JH: I think I partly wrote the book as a means of trying to get at that very question. What interests me most about Madonna is that I’m still not sure how I feel about her. But she has certainly made me consider my own feelings about sex in the public sphere.
I: “When you are thirteen/ the world is a small room/…But it’s also a complicated room/…It’s a strange time to be a girl…”. What was your writing like when you were thirteen? What were you reading then?
JH: My poetry was terrible, but I wrote really kick-ass book reports. (I’ve actually read some recently – they hold up!) With poetry, I was trying to put on a poet’s voice (and choose poem-appropriate topics) because I thought that’s what you were supposed to do. But when I read a book I liked (an example would be And I Don’t Want To Live This Life, by Nancy Spungen’s mother) and had to write critically about it, I was honestly and passionately engaged. It took years for me to discover how to take that engagement with someone else’s work and apply it to my own subject
.
I: You are a writer of great versatility– you’re a poet, a screenwriter, and you’ve also written a comic book. (Have I missed anything?) Is there anything in particular that links these things that you do? What about these modes of writing appeals to your sensibility?
JH: That covers it pretty well!
I do think there are some major links between these forms. First – they’re image-based. (Not all poetry, of course, but mine, to a large degree.) I think these forms all choose images, or scenes, to represent something much bigger than just that one moment. Images as tips-of-the-iceberg. Moments that allow the reader or viewer to fill in all sorts of gaps. Hopefully what the reader/viewer brings to those gaps is a mix of what you were thinking and what they’re bringing to the work.
They also all rely, to a degree, on economy. In screenwriting, you don’t get away with much chaff. Every moment must be part of the telling of the story, or it’ll get cut from the script before its shot – or it’ll get shot and then cut, and you’ve just wasted thirty thousand dollars. Or it doesn’t get cut even then, and audiences wonder what the hell the point of THAT scene was.
In poetry, I do find there is a revision stage in which you look at every word and wonder if it’s necessary. And if it’s necessary, is the word doing double or triple duty, really earning its place?
I: Your first and second books are very different. What is their relationship? What do they have in common?
JH: I find it difficult to make a connection too. As you have pointed out before, I think the key motif in The Octopus and Other Poems is wonder. That does apply here, too: looking at the things we as human beings explore, and why, and what that exploration costs us.
I: What do you require in your life in order to write well?
JH: I have very different needs on different days – sometimes it’s a full stomach, a clean house, and quiet. Other days the mess can pile up around me, there’s construction outside, and I’ll work hungry for six hours straight and it’s perfect. But I know I’m lucky to have enough control of my life (a husband I love, a home we love, enough money for all the essentials) to have the luxury of different needs on different days.
I: What was it like having your poem on a bus?
JH: It was very cool in theory, and very uncool in the sense that I never once saw it! In a year of my poem decorating Vancouver buses and SkyTrains while I took transit every day, I didn’t cross paths with it – though friends took photos when they saw it and sent them to me. That was nice. I also have one of the placards here in my office. That’s also nice.
I’ve just learned an excerpt from What It Feels Like for a Girl will be part of Poetry in Transit in early 2010, after the Olympics have come and gone. Wish me luck hunting it down!
I: What five poems do you think everybody should read?
JH: I never know how to do stuff like this. So without thinking about it overmuch: 1. “Supernatural Love” by Gjertrud Schnackenberg 2. “All the Desanctified Places” by Robert Bringhurst 3. “For Peter, My Cousin” by Barbara Nickel 4. “Sudden” by Michael Redhill 5. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje (I’m calling it one long poem, just because I can.)
I: Who are your favourite writers?
JH: My favourite writers are the ones I get to have nachos or burgers with. Or who come over to play Rock Band.
I: What are you reading right now?
JH: I’m reading Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean. It’s phenomenal – very accessible and yet poetic. Funnily enough, there’s a connection between that book and our conversation here. One of the main threads for Aristotle and young Alexander is the idea of balance; the “truth” that lies between two extremes, or caricatures. One of the sparks for me in writing What It Feels Like for a Girl came years ago in a lecture about pornography. There were students enraged at the medium’s exploitation of women, and there were students who felt people (including women) should do whatever they wanted with their bodies. I found myself asking the question: Is it possible – even advisable – to feel both ways about the subject? About any subject? I’m really taken with this emotional duality. Though it can be a pain when having a spirited debate… it must be very frustrating for my friends to watch me passionately not take a side!
(Author Photo by Jeff Morris)
October 16, 2009
European Vacation
Of course, I married my husband for his dreamy accent, but also so I’d have a good excuse to take frequent European vacations. (And it is a European vacation, proof here.)
And it’s that time again, because we’re off to the British seaside– it’s October after all. We’re returning to my husband’s homeland so that his parents can meet their grandchild for the first time, and while they’re busy spoiling her and ignoring us, we’ll partake in English things we love and miss, like cream tea; cheap books, beer and chocolate; newspaper supplements; penguin biscuits; lamb shanks; round postboxes; crisps; good TV and radio. Oh, and the weather. We’ll pack the brollies.
I’ll be posting a few updates while I’m gone, as well as an eagerly-awaited interview, and regular posting will resume in a week.
October 16, 2009
Dear Spadina Road Branch of the Toronto Public Library
Dear Spadina Road Branch of the Toronto Public Library,
This is a love letter.
Though I’ve actually had a crush on you for years, and on this city’s whole public library system, but lately you, Spadina Road Branch, have truly captured my heart. Though you’re not very big, your hours are few, and there is often somebody asleep on your lawn, you have had an enormous impact on my life.
Though always an avid reader, I was not such a regular patron until my daughter was born in May. Upon my baby’s birth, I found the whole world had shrunk to the size of a small city block, and it took a long time to find my way around it again.
When my daughter was six weeks old, she joined the library. The library was a destination in an otherwise empty and lonely day, but it was fun to get her card, to select books that I would enjoy reading to her at home. I also borrowed children’s CDs so we could listen to music together. And after that, I began visiting the library once a week, taking out new books and music, and DVDs to watch with my husband, borrowing books from your collection about baby sign language, baby massage, games I could play with my daughter, and child development. And slowly, I started to feel like I knew what I was doing.
In August, we were invited to join a Baby/Toddler group meeting weekly throughout the month. This was informal programming, organized by staff with limited resources, in response to requests from other patrons. And the group became the highlight of our week, such an enjoyable way to spend an hour, and we learned wonderful new songs and games. When my husband came home from work at the end of the day, he’d be eager to learn whatever we’d picked up at the library that morning, and these songs and games have become some of our baby’s favourites. We look forward to returning to the Baby group later this month.
And then there’s your people, Spadina Road. Perhaps I should have started with your staff, for this is the point that I mean most of all. Being at home all day with my baby is harder than I ever imagined it would be, and some days are more trying than others, but all is usually assuaged with a walk through your automatic doors. Your staff is so kind and friendly to me, sweet to my baby, helpful with my requests and I’m always greeted warmly. Which makes such a big difference on the hardest day, and I hope your staff realize how much value they add to customers’ experience.
That because of them, the library is not just a destination, but one of my favourite places to go, and I feel so lucky to live in your neighbourhood.
So thank you, Spadina Road Branch, with love forever and ever,
Kerry Clare and Baby Harriet
October 15, 2009
A Tyrannical Poltergeist
“There is a sense in which all novels are ghost stories: fictional characters are translucent phantoms, which readers believe in (or don’t); readers lurk in the presence of characters, spying on their most intimate moments, eavesdropping on their innermost thoughts. And however thoroughly the novelist establishes her characters’ motivations, however robustly she forges her chains of cause and effect everything that happens ultimately does so at the whim of the writer. Certain things have to happen for the narrative to progress… Every novel is haunted by a tyrannical poltergeist, in the form of its plot.” from “Poltergeist: The Little Stranger” by Thomas Jones, London Review of Books 9 July 2009
October 15, 2009
Justification
Well, I have limited myself to purchasing only one book a month. But. We’re off to England on Friday, and therefore it only makes sense to order Howards End is On The Landing and Wolf Hall from there, as they’ll be either more widely available and/or a wee bit cheaper. And by the time I get back, What Boys Like will be out, and as I’ve been planning to buy that for ages, it doesn’t quite seem like my monthly allotment (which should be more spontaneous, you know). And that copy of Birds of America that arrived last week doesn’t count either, because I only bought it to get free postage on an amazon.ca order of CDs. So basically, we’re halfway into October and I haven’t even bought one book yet. I am very proud of my restraint.
All of this is a little less ridiculous, because I’ve been reading like a madwoman lately. Harriet’s naps have turned out to be much longer when taken on me, which means that I can read a lot and nap as well. So that’s what we’ve been up to lately, which leads to a Mommy who is better-read and less exhausted.
Now reading nothing! Or rather little bits of lots of things– I’ve been rereading Jennica Harper’s poetry, the LRB (I’m caught up to late July now), and the ROM magazine. Because I’m saving Birds of America for my holiday, and am too superstitious to start it before it’s time.
October 14, 2009
She loves the library
No one takes things personally like a new mom, I’ve found. Any advice I’m given, I take as a slight: “Oh, she sounds hungry!” I translate as, “You don’t have a clue what your baby needs.” “Perhaps you’d sleep better if she was out of your room” means, “You suck and you’re depriving your baby of the opportunity to develop positive sleep habits.” It never ends. Everybody thinks they have the solutions, and I know I have no solutions, so I’m sensitive, you know?
Yesterday, however, my reaction was a bit over the top. I was at the library (picking up my reserved copy of The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems. Which is a titular lie– apparently I still have to solve them, and she just tells me how to via methods I am far too lazy to implement. My husband says we have no problems anyway and we’re doing just fine. [We do practice the EASY method already, by mistake, and it’s excellent]. Anyway, today I believe him and I’m returning the book to the library because it’s making me crazy) and the baby was squawking in her stroller.
“Oh,” said a fellow patron, not supposing who she was speaking to (naturally, as I am no one), “I guess she doesn’t like the library.”
And I flared up like a rash. “Of course, she likes the library. She loves the library. It’s her favourite place to come. We come all the time. She loves books, and text, and print media of all kinds.” Poor fellow patron looked frightened. I continued, “She’s just sick, bit of a cold. And she’s tired. And the sun’s been shining in her eyes. It’s close to her nap. We’ve been running errands and she’s sick of her stroller, plus, I’ve been depriving her of the opportunity to develop positive sleep habits. But she loves the library. Loves it, she does.”
Patron had disappeared by the time I was finished this tirade. Perhaps she’d slipped out the door while I was in the midst of my passion, and had sought hiding in a locked bathroom cubicle, I don’t know. But I am pretty sure she was a candidate for kind stranger most sorry she’d come across me yesterday.
And maybe Harriet just hates Tracy Hogg.
October 13, 2009
The English Stories by Cynthia Flood
This weekend, I had the distinct pleasure of being utterly captivated by Cynthia Flood’s collection The English Stories. The stories are linked by the experiences of eleven-year-old Amanda Ellis who travels to Oxford, England in 1951 with her parents. Her academic father is on sabbatical, researching for a book about Shelley and Keats, and the family spends their English year (which stretches into two) at The Green House guesthouse. When her father’s research takes him further afield, Amanda indulges in every colonial girl’s deepest fantasy by becoming a boarder at her school, St. Mildred’s.
The story title “The Margins are the Frame” gives a good impression of Amanda’s point of view. Amanda– by her age, culture, language and nationality– is alienated from everyone around her. And from the margins, her perspective of England, of home and away, of her parents and their relationship, of her schoolmates and teachers is surprising, misinformed, illuminating, tragic and true. And although Amanda is the anchor of the entire collection, the stories also come from additional perspectives– from other guests at The Green House, from teachers at St. Mildred’s, all of these characters on margins of their own.
This was an England not long out of war, in the throes of an age of austerity, coming to terms (or not yet) with fundamental changes in values and beliefs, and grappling with centuries of a empirical past that was quickly becoming irrelevant. And though Flood’s protagonist is young, her stories’ themes are not, which becomes the point– Amanda struggling with the gap between the world as it is and her limited understanding. Understanding which is little achieved here, for Amanda is only eleven after all, and then just twelve, and thirteen. Far too young yet for “coming of age” and Flood doesn’t do such neat resolutions anyway.
What she does do is a marvelous sentence: “At lunch on the rainy February day the King died, the sweet was custard and stewed damsons” opens “Early in the Morning”, or “The Spring term in which Kay died and Constance disappeared from St. Mildred’s, and I broke my glasses featured a school wide obsession with mealtime talk of sex” begins “Magnificat“. These sentences both convey the way in Flood encapsulates the world wide and near, the great and small, inside her literary universe. And while I want to write about my favourite stories and what each one was “about”, but I’m not sure I can contain all that in the space I have here.
But I will try: “Religious Knowledge” from the perspective of Miss Flower, teacher of religion, who has not yet mastered her own life and then becomes responsible for another when she learns about one of her pupil’s disturbing homelife; “Miss Pringle’s Hour”, the headmistress’s diary hiding a tragic love story inside it; “The Promised Land” shows the Ellis’ at the end of their sojourn and provides them with a new perspective on Canada (amongst other things); “The Margins are the Frame” in which Amanda takes up shoplifting, is ostracized at school, and learns that the maid at The Greenhouse is an unmarried mother.
But really, these descriptions don’t do these stories justice. With mere words (though there is nothing mere about her words), Flood has recreated a time and a place and an atmosphere so steeped, I could trace my finger along the patterns in the wallpaper (and she doesn’t even mention the wallpaper). These stories are challenging, tricky, ripe with allusionary gateways to the wider world of literature. And so rewarding, for the richness of character, the intricate detail, and careful plotting that holds just enough back, keeping us alert and anticipating what’s around every next turn.
October 12, 2009
On Before Green Gables
It was an enjoyable and fascinating experience to finally read Before Green Gables, the Anne of Green Gables prequel written by Budge Wilson, published last year. Budge Wilson was an author I particularly loved when I was young– the Lorinda Dauphinee stories, including A House Far From Home, The Best/Worst Christmas Present Ever, and Thirteen Never Changes. She certainly had a formidable task set before her, to write the Green Gables book. And I began reading prepared for disappointment (after all, I’d once read Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley), but found myself enjoying it after all. There is nothing disappointing about this book itself.
But. Of course. I think what is disappointing is the entire exercise, and its execution. I’m not sure why we needed a “prequel” anyway, and then to have it written by a children’s author is rather incongruous with the original material. Because Before Green Gables is distinctly a children’s book– this is what Budge Wilson does, after all. In fact, it’s basically a pared-down version of Anne of Green Gables itself, as Anne– from the age of three or four– begins to entrance all who meet her (including her alcoholic wife-beating foster father), conjure magic in unlikely places, and spin the world into something delightful. And of course part of this is her nature, but Wilson has her nurtured too– her guardians display moments of genuine goodness, she meets a surfeit of generous, spirited school teachers along the way, she learns about poetry from her foster-sister who is uncannily Anne-like herself, she meets good friends, people look out for her, and not one heart here is not warmed at one time or another.
The thing is, however, that Anne of Green Gables was not a children’s book, or was not distinctly so. And however much all of the above events also came to pass in the original novel, where they achieved their poignancy is from the awfulness of Anne’s early life. The specifics are never made particularly clear, but such silence is telling– there is a reason Anne’s story began in Bright River. I believe Marilla Cuthbert alludes to this at some point, the unspeakableness of Anne’s early history, what she might have witnessed and been subject to in the homes where she spent that part of her life. Anne is who she is, not because of kindness she met along the way, but because of sheer lack of it. Her Anne-ness is primarily a survival mechanism in a brutal world where she was completely, utterly and scarily alone.
Her life from Green Gables was indeed a kind of fairy tale, but how dark is a fairy tale at its root, after all?
Budge Wilson has written a wonderful children’s book, but a children’s book doesn’t do Montgomery’s own work justice– or at least this one doesn’t. Because there is only light here, and Anne becomes a caricature. Before Green Gables also suffers from being so unorganic, where it is obvious that the narrative was always a means to an end and not the end itself. But what’s missing most of all is the subliminal, what’s left unsaid, all those aspects of the narrative that fly over kids’ heads leaving them sensing something there, and loving the story all the more.
Montgomery’s work was full of that stuff, which is why we return to her again and again.
